 Strategist and user experience designer, project manager for the past four or five years now. And, this is Courtney. Hello, I'm Courtney Clark. I'm a senior user experience designer at Forum One as well, and I've been doing this for about a decade, working mostly with nonprofits, government agencies, foundations, and the like. My glasses were pink, though. I love that image so much. So, our title that you've seen is a little bit full of jargon. It's got buzzwords, and we find that kind of annoying, quite honestly. So, here are some other possible titles. Let's How Long Form. Yeah. Or Dissecting Long Form, because we're going to try to do these during our presentation today. Our primary ask of you today is that you walk out of here and you are super excited to do the following things. You want to A, you want to give Long Form a try. You want to try narrative. Work that into your content. And finally, we hope you use our tips and our framework to kind of get started in thinking down that process. And Courtney's going to get more into that a little down the line. So, we have reasons for you to do these things as well. That's good. It's not just to be a cool kid. It's also because you are a publisher. If you have a website, you are a publisher. The web has kind of forced everybody into this role. If you have any type of content, and if it's longer than 2,000 words, it should live online. You should be thinking digitally first. You should also be thinking about the user experience of that content. The second reason, people like good, long stuff, right? And they like to share it. There's a joke in there somewhere. And finally, Long Form is just cool. I said it's not just to be part of the cool group, but it's super fun and it's super exciting and it's kind of the cutting edge of content. So, in terms of design and usability, I think. But anyway. We've been racking our brains to define Long Form in a concrete way, right? To make sense of all these different definitions floating around, because there is a lot floating around. So, Courtney and I talked about this for like hours, exhaustively to weird degree even. And I feel like we've made sense out of the several types of Long Form floating around out there. And that's part of what we'd like to talk to you about today. So, get on the Long Form train. Chew, chew. I'm sorry. At a high level, Long Form content means content that is mostly static and that it doesn't change hardly ever. It's more than 2,000 words and it's self-contained, meaning it probably would have existed before the web in a very contained sort of way, right? Examples of documents like this might include brochures like very long brochures, policy reports, research articles, magazine articles, et cetera. And you'll hear more examples in a minute. All right. So, Long Form gets thrown around a lot as a term. The term has its roots in journalism, right? So, for instance, if you search the hashtag Long Form on Twitter and if you're using it today, you'll see a lot of examples that look like these, you know, really punchy big images that are super exciting and it might have video in the background and there might be music playing and there's parallax and just party everywhere, a little bit like Snowfall if anybody's familiar with that. Because a while back in the New York Times published this article, Snowfall. It was a traditional Long Form feature-style, like news article, but it was really highly designed and it was, geez, it was all the rage. And it was well written. That's really, I think, ultimately why it still lives around. But Long Form isn't just for journalists anymore, right? Since the web has ushered everybody, again, into publishing, Long Form is now of interest to, well, everybody including, I think everybody in this room. And because I'm increasingly frustrated with this phrase Long Form that I keep saying over and over again, Courtney and I got all reductionist. So here's how we propose Long Form be broken down. We reduced it to three elements. There's the look and feel, structures, and copy. So, of course, how it feels, how it's organized, and what it says. So let's dig into that a little bit. Look and feel, right? In the flurries of excitement around Long Form content, this is almost always what's brought up. You hear about these really strong reactions for, like, look at this beautiful video, like we just mentioned with Snowfall. I mean, when that was released, I mean, nothing was really new as far as the copy went, but it was a news feature, right? But it was so pretty and so new. So a lot of times when Long Form content is brought up in any capacity, especially in discussions around web and content design, it's these elements that are probably at the center of the discussion. And there are definitely clear trends, and I've touched on a few of them already. This tendency towards big, full-screen images that are just so captivating. Parallax is a big thing that keeps showing up everywhere for good or bad, I don't know. And in some cases, sounds, I've seen a few articles that play, like, features of artists playing music that they perform. Loud colors and, again, striking imagery. But the focus, to be clear, the purpose of Long Form content is not on these elements. These elements are meant to support the copy. Next up, we have structure, or how that copy is organized. Well, there's likely a lot of room for discussion and there's probably some nuance here, but we wanted to break it down as simply as we could. And so we broke it down into these two kind of opposite things. You've got a linear piece, or you have a nonlinear piece, or what we're calling exploratory. Linear is in a line. Yes, I know that's very obvious, but I just want to make sure we all get on the same page in terms of what we mean when we say linear. So linear content is meant to be red. I'm going to stress that. It's meant to be red. Point A to point B, there is a beginning, there is a physical end. There are levels, magazines, features, articles, blog posts, et cetera. It's about as classic as it gets in terms of published content. Two, with linear content, a reader's physical journey through that piece is almost completely predictable. They are almost exclusively reading from point A to point B, which brings me to my final point in that that predictability allows us to design very specific experiences around that content because we know how they are going to go through it. Now exploratory, on the other hand, is nonlinear. It expects varying paths of progression through this piece of content. It's a lot more of what we think when we think about a website. You click through it to get around. It's not meant to be red from start to finish. For example, I'm trying to think of better examples, but think of like a full magazine as a piece of exploratory content. You're probably not reading from cover to finish. You're jumping around and finding what you want. Or think of a copy table book, an annual report, a cookbook, encyclopedia, user guides. These documents are experienced in a very different way than, say, a snowfall-like article or a novel. It's also a little bit harder to use exploratory structures to tell full narrative experiences, but we'll get on to that in a second, too. All right, we've talked about look and feel. We've talked about structure. Now this is the fun stuff, right? Let's talk about words. Traditionally, long form meant, again, more than so many words, but we all know that reading experiences are not created equally. Some pieces are meant to moralize, to persuade in some way, while others serve to teach, inform, instruct. Some have agendas. Others try so hard not to have agendas, journalism. Again, some are legally required to not have an agenda, which is overlooked a lot of times. So we broke down, well, long form into two categories, reference and narrative. This could just as easily have been not persuade and persuade or not emotionally connect and emotionally connect if the word persuade or persuasion feels kind of dirty. But let's look at reference. By definition, reference does not have an agenda. And yes, this gets complicated philosophically in terms of what can have a bias and can you not have a bias. But just for the purposes of this, let's simplify it and say it does not have an agenda. I think cookbooks, data briefs, trend reports, census reports, portrayals of data. This kind of content is almost always meant to be searched or kind of poked through referenced because it's reference material. And it's often used for other people to find their own narrative within it. So I might use an encyclopedia to find information in order to form thoughts about things I know nothing about or for a politician to find data in order to build his or her political platform. Narrative, on the other hand, has an agenda. It always does. Whether it's trying to sell you something or it's just trying to make you feel something. In fiction and creative nonfiction, so novels or magazine articles, journalism, all of that, this comes out as a theme. It's not trying to sell you something, but it's absolutely trying to connect with you in some way. In marketing, in politics, in brand-related kind of stuff, this comes out in a rhetoric sort of way where it is trying to connect with you emotionally, but it's also trying to get you to buy something or act in some fashion. So with this agenda, narrative is telling a story, traditional or otherwise. I've hesitated so far to use the word story and I feel just weird about it because it gets thrown around a lot and I don't think a lot of people stop to think what they mean when they say story. They just want it to tell a story. So in this case, narrative and story, we're going to use interchangeably, but narrative is what we're going to stick with. So by our own framework, there are four types of long-form content out there right now, some more commonly occurring than others. We've got linear reference, linear narrative, exploratory reference and exploratory narrative. So clean and so simple. So let's take a look at what this looks like in the wild and while we're looking through these, try to think about similar content you've seen or content you have and how they might fit into this matrix here. The first example is the AAMC Association... I hate having... Association of American Medical Colleges Diversity Facts and Figures. So eloquent. Its purpose? Well, it's exploratory in the sense that it's presenting a whole lot of data. Now this report, if you don't know anything about it, I didn't for a very long time. The purpose of it is to present a bunch of statistical information without forming any sort of argument. It's just giving you the facts, giving you the figures, hence facts and figures. And so in the idea that it's going to be clicked around, right? Nobody's going to want to read this and start to finish probably. They're going to be searching for something they kind of already have in mind. They want a figure, they want a fact and they want to build it into their own narrative. And again, the copy is trying very hard not to take any stance. Politically speaking, as an organization, they're very actively trying to not take a political stance. So, reference. We've got exploratory structure, we've got reference copy. We were hoping to actually find more examples of this, but they tend to hide in PDFs everywhere, which brings us to linear reference. There's nothing here. They're probably out there, kind of like the exploratory reference we just mentioned, but this kind of information tends to get stuck either in PDFs or behind paywalls or in PDFs behind paywalls. It's like this archaic structure that's very much stuck in the pre-digital lifetime and coming from scientific kind of background. You see that a lot. So the types of organizations you tend to produce data briefs and other reference materials typically do so in that print-first mentality, which means it's designed in a publication tool, exported as a PDF, and then uploaded somewhere and forgotten and moving into the ether. And it's funny because, oops, I clicked on something. Oh no! How do I get back? Let's see. Can you help me get back, Courtney? Let's do this. We can do this together, everybody. Do you have any idea how hard it is to try to click? Isn't it on the right? It is. Ah, there we go. Ha-ha! Somebody dance. Yeah, can I dance with you? Oh, there we go. Ha! Nailed it. Oh, no. Boom. Is it going to work? No, it's not. I know. I can't do anything right. I'm going to drag this over somewhere. Oh, it's in full screen. Wow, thanks for hanging out here with us today, guys. All right, give me one second. I'm going to fix this. Do you want to fix it? Sure. Do you want to just text support, really? Well, I keep talking real fast. I can talk loud while Courtney's trying to make this better for me. What I was getting at with this, with this World Bank article that I accidentally clicked on, they put out this report, funnily enough, in a PDF that probably no one read. And they put out this great report about how a third of, and they produce a lot of reports, a third of their PDFs had gone undownloaded completely. And I think over 40, like more than 40% of the rest of their content, their PDF content, had been downloaded fewer than 100 times. So there was a joke in that article that I had, again, accidentally clicked on. There's a really funny joke. It's sort of not funny, though. What if the world's biggest problems have been solved somewhere in just the depths of a PDF that was never downloaded? It's funny, but it's kind of scary, right? Oh, do we fix it? Yeah, I think so. I'm gonna dance. I'll start singing. I did it earlier. I know. I'm trying. Oh, oh. They get upset so easily. Ha! All right. So moving on from... Now that our heart attack is over... That's right. I was about to start singing, you guys. This is gonna be fun. Okay, so our next example is still exploratory, but we've moved on to narrative. So this is Uncube. It's an architecture magazine. It uses these short bits of narrative throughout this larger structure to tell a story through a very specific but larger theme. This could have definitely lived in a linear fashion, but the creators chose to spread it out in a very weird but interactive, fun sort of way. Again, using these sub-themes of smaller pieces to form this bigger narrative. The powerful photography supports this theme, which in this issue is Animal House. What's it trying to say? It's an argument, thesis. We'll get into that in a second. It's an argument that the animals have, and Namho, you'll like this, animals have affected human architecture in very real and active ways, and it goes through all sorts of really cool examples of that. So narrative in the sense that it has something to prove. Trying not to hit anything new. Again, exploratory narrative. So this is Coca-Cola's annual report. You click around to where you want to go, and given that these kinds of documents traditionally are sent around to shareholders, it makes sense that a shareholder with tiny shares, you know, I own like one stock, one share and Coke, might be less interested, say, than somebody with like a 20% stake in the company. So they tend to want different information. So why is this narrative, you might be thinking, it's a report. It reports facts. It reports figures. Here's how we've been doing. Well, this is more than just a presentation of data. They have a very clear thing. They want to sell to shareholders, and that is, we are doing fine, right? You invested in the right place. So invoking a sense of comfort is the persuasion in this sense. Hence narrative. And yay, finally, this is my favorite linear narrative. This is the low-hanging fruit of long-form content, because it's the easiest to find. This stuff is everywhere. Kind of the golden goose. It's what everyone wants to be. People bring up long-form. They bring up snowfall, and this is a very similar piece. Russia left behind. It's from New York Times. It's journalistic. Journalism has had the most at stake in this sense anyway, because they've been shaken up by this whole web thing. So they've been spending a lot of money and a lot of time to try to figure out how to make themselves relevant is too harsh a word, but that's what it feels like. So why is this narrative, maybe you might ask, or I would anticipate might be asked? Journalism isn't supposed to be outwardly trying to convince you of anything, except they absolutely, especially in long format, have to be hitting a point that says, this is how this matters to you, right? They're not trying to sell you anything necessarily. They're absolutely trying to get you to connect to it in a way, because that's what makes these long feature-like articles good. A great example from an organization that I love, The Gates Annual Letter, from The Gates Foundation. As a shiny example of what other nonprofits could be doing with their content. So it's linear, and it lives on a single page, and it has a beginning at the top and an end at the bottom. Now this absolutely could have been exploratory. They've got a really great table of contents. They've thought through this, but they made a choice, and I'd argue they made a good one, because by making this linear, they could anticipate that I would be starting at the top, ending at the bottom, and they added all sorts of really cool little interactions, and they added quizzes along the way that just served as punches to the gut before you get down. They knew how I was going to be going through this piece, and it's the linear structure that allowed that. And why is it narrative? Again, it's a letter, it's a report. Like a letter to shareholders, The Gates Foundation needs to convince readers of this letter, that the foundation is solving the right problems, and they're solving them the right way. This is evangelizing The Gates Foundation, and that's a good thing, I think. But it's selling a brand, right? It's selling big ideas. Okay, so at the turning, and you're thinking about your own website's content, because if you have a website, you are a publisher. I'm going to keep saying that until it gets real annoying. So these are all great examples of the checkout, and I encourage you to keep thinking about this in the kind of framework we propose. You may have noticed, though, that most of our examples are narrative in nature, and that is not an accident. Are essential for making your point. If you have a point to make, you need stories. Whether you're a small Etsy shop, or a huge, you know, world-changing non-profit organization, you have stories and you should tell them. A little bit, because we'll run out of time, thanks to my technical problems, and just that I blather a lot. So, let's dig into the really abstract kind of head in the clouds fun stuff, like stories and narrative. So, I want to make one thing clear. We're going to talk about narrative now. The look, feel, and structure elements are a part of other talks we have in the works, but we just don't have enough time to get into them now. So, where are we getting all head in the clouds? Easy. Because it's simplest, story focuses us, or forces us to think, draw conclusions, and empathize. It's a form of cause and effect, which we just really respond well to. We're wired to look for these patterns. And yes, I say wired to look for patterns. It's definitely off to science-y, and I'm not going to claim science says this, I'm not going to do that. But there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we respond well as humans to stories, and that we just understand it better when we're spoken to in stories, or communicated to in stories. And telling these stories, if done thoughtfully and with a good understanding of what's needed, you will always stand out as an organization, or person, or whoever you're acting for. So powerful. So, since we've come up for air, let's take again a quick look at our own point. Here's what we're asking. And here is why. And you guys are super experts on long form now, so let's get into narrative and story, I almost said story, it's terrible. Alright, so we can deconstruct all the concrete parts of a long form piece. Now, let's get abstract and have some fun. So, you want to incorporate stories into your design, into your content. No matter what it is you're producing, it's important to understand those key underlying elements like what do we mean when we say narrative. There's a lot of elements involved with narrative, a lot of people with opinions on the matter, but we're going to look at the three most important parts. The first being plot might be obvious. The characteristic of a narrative is that it has a starting point, but it has an ending point. There's a beginning and an end. And on this journey from point A to point B, stop happening. This is plot. It is self-contained, and while the end might not end for the character, it's an end for the reader or the audience. This is a narrative plot mapped out on an XY axis of like time and level of crappiness. A cockroach and then think up top and this might just be me, but like Benedict Cumberbatch professing his love for you. So, this idea of stories being mappable though because tons of other people have done the same. Many people argue that plots can be mapped, as you can see as an example here. These eight in particular, and again these are, you can take these home with you at the slide deck. We won't get into two involved with these now, but these were illustrated by a graphic designer, but were originally proposed by Kurt Vonnegut as the eight story types. Now this is where it gets a little funny. Not everybody agrees on just eight. There's a lot of overlap here, but you get the idea. Again not meant to be read. Don't worry about digging into these just yet. You get it. Stories are mappable. And they're great reference points for when you're ready to start your story. Plus important, and now you've got some places to start. You don't have a villain. Whether it's yourself, I don't care. You don't have a slick. Is your main character sitting in her living room binge watching Netflix all day with a perfect wireless connection? There's no conflict. There's no story. Luckily conflict types have been mapped out too, and lo and behold, themes have appeared. So it's cutting. Oh, it's not cutting off. Okay, good. You can see here I've organized things by person versus it doesn't have to be person. It's whatever your protagonist is. It could be organization, animal. Again, alien. I don't know. So, for instance, in my previous example, I won't read all of these, but just giving you some concrete examples of what this looks like. My character from earlier, definitely not me. Sitting in her apartment all day bingeing on Netflix. This becomes interesting through the following conflicts. You've got person versus self. She starts to feel really bad about this whole, like, doing nothing all day thing and remembers all the people she's blown off. Conflict. Person versus technology. Her Wi-Fi stops working right in the middle of a really good Daredevil episode, like a really good part too. Afflict, but it's a conflict. Person versus God. Floor appears in her kitchen for some reason, fishing through her fridge. She grabs a beer and runs over to her couch and, like, sits down and stares her down. He's like, I'm gonna make your life miserable. Again, I don't know why. Just conflict, though. It's definitely conflict. And then person versus supernatural as another example. There's a ghost baby living in her apartment. And while she's watching Daredevil, she sees it out of the corner of her eye. It's so small, so scary. She panics. But so, anyway, you get the thing. And so, we've created stories, ridiculous stories, but we've created stories through the use of conflict added to our plot. Finally... Come on, Google. There we go. We have theme. What is your point? You have to have stress enough. If you're telling a story, you're selling something. I know I've been beating that in to everybody here, whether it's a motion, a product, a service, yourself, anything. When you tell a story, you aim to convince somebody of something. So I'm gonna get really preachy here. Theme, right? It goes by all sorts of horrible phrases that I'm sure everybody's got nightmares about from undergraduate English composition. What's your point? What's your thesis statement? What's your central argument? The moral of the story? The big idea? The message? What is your point? The thing to get a grasp on. It's the hardest thing about constructing a narrative. And it doesn't get easier until you just like keep trying, keep trying, and keep talking to folks. But it is your responsibility to make it happen. Because even with the best plot, the weirdest conflict, like those baby, if you don't have a theme, the underlying point, something people can connect to, you've totally wasted your time and it's just, it's hopeless. So there's a lot of research out there on theme, and so I know I'm being super abstract. I'm not gonna recap it all right here, but we've got some resources and are happy to continue this conversation after the talk or through Twitter, all the other weird ways we have to communicate these days. Like at happy hour. So at this point, I'm being so abstract and I'm getting pretty cheap, so I'm gonna let Courtney take over. So Courtney, please bring us back down to earth. No more ghost babies. Okay, so really good points. A good checklist of things that you need when you're constructing a narrative. But what does that all mean? Where are we supposed to start? So I've outlined five steps to help you get started. The first one, when you go home today, or even now, is to just review your content, right? What you're looking for are things that could fit neatly into long form. And so based on our definition you're looking for things that are mostly static, 2,000 words or more, and generally self-contained. So as you're looking for those items, they may be living in PDFs. They may be a brochure site. They may be policy reports or research articles. Start looking for those things to see what would be fitting for long form. And as I said, it's time. It's time to resurrect the PDF. Nobody's reading them anyway. Make them interactive and engaging. They're probably living in a closet somewhere. So we want to resurrect them like Frankenstein. But I picked a cute, happy one to make this sort of fun. Step number two, define your structure and copy type, right? So you have your thing. You're like, I think this would make a great long form of peace. Well, you need to outline the structure and the copy to know what you're going to write, how you're going to build it out. So number one, answer the question, should people read this from point A to point B? Is there a straight line as Christina said? The answer is yes. You've got linear on your hands. If you answer no, it's more exploratory. And the reason why you should ask this question is so that when you're looking at examples, you know ones that are comparable to what you're hoping to do and to accomplish. Once you've figured out your structure, next you need to answer this question about copy. So are you trying to convince somebody of something? Sounds really general, but if you say yes, you've got a narrative. Christina has talked at length about narrative. If you answer no, this may be more of a reference situation. Now, when this happens, I'll warn you, people will say, no, no, we don't have an agenda. We're not trying to convince anyone of anything. And then you should ask yourself again, are we trying to convince somebody of something? You have to keep asking that question because what we find, usually you are, you're just not being honest about it. And so we see this a lot. We work with nonprofits and some of them are just not used to always putting their brand out there and being a little more direct that they're trying to convince somebody to take action to be aware of the cause, things like that. So this is a question that's important to ask maybe a couple times. Number three, time to check out examples. So we shared some great examples here. Here's a quick number of types for each of the different long form examples we shared. So you can read that and no reports, data reports. Again, this is to look at examples that are already doing what you hope to be doing. It's a good place to get ideas. See how other people are doing it. And specifically for linear and exploratory linear puns, as Christina said, right? A lot of them are journalistic. They're written by writers and so the linear narrative is really great. So you see this on Buzzfeed, they have great future articles, New York Times, Pitchfork does really cool stuff because they're incorporating some cool audio with it, ESPN, others like that. And then in a report, so on the commercial side, Coca-Cola, it's hard to see from the screenshot but there's a video actually in the background and it's very interactive. So it's a cool experience too. And then MacArthur Foundation, they're in a report for the last couple years has been long form, quite nice. Number four, get your team together and what does the team look like? So from the beginning you need to get these people together. New York Times has a huge, huge team to do this, right? And they've got lots of writers, they have a whole interactive team. So it may not be as big as New York Times, but these are some of the key roles you'll need when you're doing this. So it may be five people, we've got a couple writers, front end developer, designer, UX, back end developer. And the purpose here is to remember that a lot of people see long form and they're just so amazed by the interactions and the whiz bang and they forget like, oh yeah, we've got to write this stuff now to structure it and pull it together. Oh yeah, and we have to build it not just like make it scroll in a really cool way. So start thinking about the content early. Have a couple writers, you need them. Now your team might not be that big, right? People can play multiple roles. So you may have a team as small as three where the writer is also a user experience person, designer, however you want to mix and match it, it can be smaller. The main point though is that you need a couple writers. And as Christina will tell you writers should never work alone, right? Just as developers need code reviews, writers need other eyes. And sometimes they can get into the weeds. So all the time it's helpful to work as a team to make sure somebody is pulling you up with a big picture. And the last one, number five. Now it's time to actually get to work, right? Brainstorm, writing, designing. And you need to know the copy and structure before you start. The copy informs the structure and the structure should inform the design. So another thing we see is everyone falls in love with interactions and I'm a user experience designer, I love that stuff. But where the project will fail is when you lead with it. The design and the interaction has to support the copy. People may scroll through it once if it has cool interactions, but to actually have someone engage, you have to have the copy and structure figured out. Cool. So hey, we're DrupalCon, what are the Drupal considerations? So there are a couple. We talked to our team of developers who are working on this stuff. And the main thing that comes up is author experience, right? You've got a couple authors. You may even have a larger editorial team if you have 10 people. That experience is going to be way different from two people. So it's good to know from the beginning because you can be deliberate about who's inputting what, where, making sure you've got workflow figured out and moderation. That becomes way more important as you have a larger team of authors. And so you may need to gate and vet some of that stuff. The second thing is building entity relationships. So at the core of the long-form piece is the content model. So if you have two types of content outlining where they meet and how they should be referenced is a really strong content modeling tool. So defining the different types of content and how they relate is good to know as well. And then lastly, identifying content fields and field groups. We did a project where a client of ours had a really large report. It was 50 pages. PDF. We resurrected a PDF. It was not as easy as it sounds. So what they wanted to do was pull out highlights from the report. That makes sense. And they knew that the highlights would be a video or an image or a quote. So we had to build a system where they could add a highlight and then fill out the fields for each different type of highlight, whether it was a video quote or image. So your developer obviously needs to know what types of things you're going to highlight and how, if those are going to be reused, build it in a way that it can be reused. So in this case, the author could go in and add a highlight, choose what type of highlight it was, and fill out the appropriate fields. So this is super important stuff, right? Because how you build it impacts the experience people have. The last thing is, so how do you prove author experience? In a couple ways, obviously, training and preparing staff, making sure you have good labeling back there, you know, making sure your field labels are clear, tool tips help, documentation helps. The main thing is having that open line of communications so that once the team has their vision of what they wanted to say, that when they're ready to input content, they still know where to put things. And last, this is just because we wanted to embarrass Andy, really. But Andy is one of our lead developers and he's very passionate about this topic. And he emphasizes that Drupal is so powerful that sometimes that makes the author experience tough. And he was very adamant about that. So great platform to do long form. Just be aware that you're going to have to consider the author experience when you're doing this. All right guys. If you go home and remember anything, remember these things. Or try, you know. We're defining long form as something that is 2,000 words or more, mostly static and self-contained. That's where we're starting, right? Couple more things. When you're talking about structure, we have defined it or we're proposing that you either have a linear structure or an exploratory structure. Copy, narrative, or reference. Also important to know that most of the long form, and we've said this already, but it's so important to stress most of the long form you're seeing today is linear narrative. And the reason why we're pressing on this point is because we often have groups who come to us and show us these really cool things that the New York Times has done or Buzzfeed is saying, hey, do this for our data report. And what's hard to communicate is that why you were so engaged in this is because the New York Times has excellent writers who wrote a linear piece that you're experiencing. So actually you're asking for, sure it's long form and look and feel, but the way it's structured is much different. So the process of creating it will be very different. And then lastly, oh man, if you guys could all just take your PDFs and pull them out of that archive they are such good candidates for a long form treatment. And it's a good place to start, right? Because a lot of the copy is already written so you're adjusting more than starting from scratch. So again, please give it a go. It's fun. It's really fun to do. Give long form a try. Give narrative a try. We have tips in here. We have a tweeted out the slide deck that has all the links in here so you can reference back to them. And lastly, if you do linear narrative, it's really cool, but Christina would like to yell at you and say, go big or go home. So again, here's some more resources. Websites, book, Twitter, you can search for the hashtag long form. Lots of good stuff there. And then lastly, thanks. Thanks for listening. We're proposing this outlining what long form actually is and we'd love to hear your thoughts and challenge us even because we're trying to make sense of it today. So eager to hear your questions. Thank you. Are you taking questions? Yeah! So one thing I noticed right from the outset is everything here is focused on words. And I would argue that some of the best storytellers or narrative tellers in your pieces, in your frame, are the movie makers here in Hollywood and Bollywood in other locations. And I didn't see anything here on video, although there were a couple mentions that was part of other stories. And given people's attention now and preference for video and just as examples you can go and look for how many tutorials there are on Drupal and how many are written versus how many are on video, that you'd find a lot more people who didn't pay attention to a well-made video than a well-written long form article. Yeah, no, that's a great point and it was one of the things we considered because it wasn't just movies we were having an issue with. It was like, okay, where do films fit in and where do instructional videos and where do video games fit in? This was a big one for me because I also write a lot about video games. And so we had to kind of just draw a line in the sand and say, okay, with long form content we're just gonna focus on words because all of a sudden we had this huge just enormous topic. So I mean, absolutely there is totally a case for like, okay, should you consider this to be a video? Should you consider it to be like an app? There are lots of other ways this content could live, but we had to just focus. But I absolutely agree and video games are another big question mark too, I think. And a good idea for another talk. And a great idea for another talk. Okay, hi. First of all, thank you. I come from an English composition background, so I'm gonna ask a horrible question. Yes. At what point you talked about making an impact, and I know that we're talking about long form, at what point do you start to introduce the idea of visual media or interactive media in the process of constructing your content? Does it redefine it at some point? I mean, and that's my horrible question because my immediate reaction is, absolutely not. But I mean, it's in the forefront of your mind, right, as soon as you start to write, especially like a narrative where you, you know, hate to go back to snowfall, but it's definitely encapsulated in a way to accentuate the visual media. Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think being flexible is such it seems like a cop out answer, but coming from an agile background, I'm pretty sure I'm like beaten into me. So in terms of when to start considering those interactions, I think once you start with the copy and you start with the theme and you start with those kinds of really heady ideas and once you get to the point in the process where you're starting to think about those kinds of interactions, that is the right time for those things to be feeding off each other because chances are your big idea is going to stick around, but but overall, if they're going to make each other better on all the right ways. So do you find yourself going back and re-approaching? Not in terms of theme, usually. I definitely in the projects I've worked on have gone back and started to reconsider the way I've kind of formed the plot, if you will. That's not the perfect term here, but the plot has been restructured, but that big central idea doesn't really change based on those interactions. Okay, thank you. You're the best Elsa ever. Oh, thank you! So one of the reasons I really like reading long form articles is because I can stop and then pick them up later and still be able to kind of think about it. What are some suggestions that you might have for things like bookmarking your spot, especially if you're using scrolling and not pagination, how do you make sure that if a reader does go away from a piece that they can come back and easily remember where they are or pick up where they left off? No, that's a great question and Courtney might be better if she's the UXer here. Yeah, so obviously in the Gates Notes example there's a table of contents and we're seeing more of this in some of the long form examples, especially the exploratory ones where there are clear sections so you know where you are as you're going through. So that's the obvious answer. What I haven't thought actually is for the narrative ones bookmarking a place just like you would in a book, right? That's cool. I haven't seen that actually. I've seen sites where you can highlight the text or they pull out potential tweets that you can have but I haven't seen a place where you can put a marker and then my next question is like, how do they know that's your marker and how is it saved without creating a user account and all those fun things? So I don't actually know the answer but it's a really great question especially because there's such a huge comparison between actual literature or a book and then the long form experience. Just to piggyback on that and I think we're going to see a lot more kind of experimentation around this exact idea as people are more and more convinced that no people do have attention spans and they do like to read. It's crazy. I think we're finally coming back around and giving people credit on actually reading so I think we'll be seeing a lot more of this soon. That's a great question. I wish we had a better answer. This is how. Hi. The content authors that I'm dealing with are just now understanding and learning the concept of writing for SEO so I'm wondering how all that fits in. Like sprinkling keywords within content and body and things like that. If it's in a narrative a story format is there a different method of writing for SEO than what has been traditionally put forth? I go by what Google one of Google's top things they say about SEO is like if it's good and if it's structured well that is the best thing you can do for SEO and it's not the quickest and easiest answer but if it's good and people read it it will perform well in search engines. In terms of other keyword style stuff Courtney might know better than that but good stuff. Yeah, it's an interesting question because in content strategy there's this whole like creating a piece of content and having it be on tone, on message and style guides that accommodate for that and this is where journalists are really great at it they've been doing that stuff for so long so it is a new way of thinking for people who are just starting to write web content and I think of it as sort of a parallel track with this or even a step that happens before where as an organization or as a group those defining the tone and the key messages should happen early and should work across all your content because it's representing that single organization so we have we walk through messaging architecture activities talking about primary secondary and so on messages, tone, all the style guides stuff It's the ghost baby I can't do it So your question can you say your question again because I think I answered it I think you did, I'm being distracted here No, it kind of makes sense because I think if the content authors are using are starting to use a lot of the expertise that journalists have used over the years where you're highlighting point of an article is throughout the article and kind of repeating key concepts of the article that's kind of like sprinkling keywords through content I mean I'm a developer I'm not an author so I'm kind of learning that stuff as I go but it kind of makes sense that that would be good for SEO Absolutely, great because you're using the same tone and messages and presumably some keywords in there I have another point the other point I was going to make is that the other thing that we can take from the journalism profession is they have a really strong governance model there's an editor in chief there are section editors and then there are authors and staff writers and what we see a lot is that websites don't have any governance model it's like the web developer or the web master is owns it all and so another thing that we do is we like to come in and say who owns this who's in charge of updating it and when there's a problem it's going to fix it with the content and so a lot of times we're retrofitting their governance model but this is another case where you may have a writer but there's an editor to review it that checks for that stuff, tone, message, keywords so there's a little bit of like a structure around that supports all of this Good question How are we doing on time? Do you have through another We have ten minutes Perfect, okay First of all thank you, it was a great presentation So most of the talk kind of focused on how to organize single stories and how to set up a narrative for single stories Do you ever find that you're applying the same technique to craft a narrative for say an entire website and if so how do you go about doing that? I can talk to you I have an immediately recent example on a project I'm on right now their goal is to work with people who study STEM pedagogy, like to study how to teach STEM and then they're working with people who are actual STEM practitioners and so they have this really big message and they're actively wanting to tell that story and that's why they came to us and they're super excited about it, it was a dream come true so what we did on that project in terms of just how do we make this website tell a story another talk we're working on by the way how do we make this website tell a story? So we started wireframing we did a whole bunch of exercises in a four or six hour kickoff eight hours? and tried to get to their key organizational goals, their values, all the brandy kind of terms really did dig into conversation and then when we started wireframing we wireframed based totally on their messaging, so we determined what their key messages were and what their secondary messages were and we started to weave that through our site map and our wireframes just based on messaging and that was really, really helpful and they responded really well to it we're currently building that site so I don't know how well it's going to work it's going to work great but it's really helped us focus on that story that they wanted to tell and we had this whole story discussion, it's really helpful Thank you, that's a big help Thanks The other thing I would add is the same tools I was just talking about figuring out messaging and tone it's the primary message you can do that for websites too, you can do it for organizations or you can do it for websites and so that's exactly what we did, our kickoff was about what's the big idea, why should I care about this and they had a huge team of 20 people who all had to talk and fight it out to see where they agreed what they thought the major message that they were trying to share and also considering like the audience that they're trying to tell this story too and making sure it resonates with that audience Yeah, and one more piggyback sorry to jump in, I think the only where this veers off course from our presentation in terms of websites and crafting stories around websites is that once you have identified the copy or the content as the meat of it as either a narrative you want a story or you just strictly reference once you've identified that instead of looking at structure you start doing feature mapping you start to brainstorm around how that story maps the features and all sorts of things it's complicated but we're working on it forever Hi So I do have a question but I wanted to mention something that was relevant to that bookmarking long form content I saw recently bucket.org's tutorials they've got the long form instruction and then they've got a static menu on the side so the content scrolls and as the content scrolls the url actually updates Oh, that's great to match wherever you are so it's easy to bookmark it for like anchor tags What's the site called? Bitbucket, it's their tutorial Getting Started site That's great, thank you Oh, I was just going to say Yeah, absolutely, I think the step-by-step instructional stuff that's a good place to look for bookmarking examples So I'm glad you got that And then what you're saying about the PDFs about resurrecting them Are you suggesting strip the content out and put it in webpages or do you want us to redo the PDFs and keep it in PDFs? Oh no, don't keep them in PDFs Okay So let's be realistic, I mean organizations still, they need PDFs or they're convinced they do and to print out an email and share so realistically we're not going to get rid of them all together but at least they should be living online first Thank you Oh, go ahead I think the main point is that the way we use information is obviously transitioning and the PDFs are sort of the thing we're trying to drag along but it's just slow going for some reason I think part of it is because people haven't really figured out how to develop like a long form template that can be reused for what were multiple PDFs before so we're actually starting to do some of that work with our clients but it is it takes time right to build out those content types and that whole structure and it takes money too whereas right now they open Microsoft Word type it up, insert images and export to PDF that's way cheaper and so it's partially a time and cost thing but our point is that it can be way more engaging if you figure out how to publish it on the web it helps your SEO it helps your organization's prominence there are a lot of great things if you're willing to invest in it and that's going to happen slowly because in educational programs I mean I've witnessed it firsthand in grad school they are still educating like publication first or non-digital first design though that's going to happen slowly probably not by by those folks hey I was just going to sort of pimp Eaton's talk from earlier this morning he did basically an exploration of linear narrative content in the long form style and how to associate rich media back with it so if anybody's looking at the technical details of trying to get that content pushed into the actual story you're producing that's a great place to get started Jeff Eaton's that was the fighting over the yeah fighting over the body field something along those lines yeah thank you very much we should figure it out great well any other questions I'm not going to sing it and for all of you out there forum one is hiring so visit us come chat with us now or at our booth check out this URL thank you